Literature
New Criticism
New Criticism is a literary theory that emerged in the 20th century, focusing on close reading and analysis of the text itself, rather than considering external factors like authorial intent or historical context. It emphasizes the importance of form, structure, and language in understanding a literary work, aiming to uncover deeper meanings and complexities within the text.
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10 Key excerpts on "New Criticism"
- Vincent B. Leitch(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
Third, New Criticism champions an organic theory of literature rather than a dualistic conception of form and matter; it focuses on the words of the text in relation to the full context of the work: each word contributes to a unique context and derives its precise meaning from its place in the poetic context. Fourth, New Criticism practices close reading of individual works, attending scrupulously to nuances of words, rhetorical figures, and shades of meaning as it attempts to specify the contextual unity and meaning of the work in hand. Fifth, New Criticism distinguishes literature from both religion and morality mainly because many of its adherents have definite religious views and seek no substitutes for religion, T H E N E W C R I T I C I S M 2 7 morality, or literature. 2 Though Brooks' summary list of traits needs refine-ment and supplementation, it can serve as a rough charter of New Critical formalist ideas and methods. For some members of the School, this cluster of concepts constituted an organized critical system, while for others it amounted to a temporary set of attitudes about literature and criticism. To understand what New Critics stood for, it is useful to summon from the past what they stood against. In a retrospective assessment published in the late 1970s, Wellek recalled that New Critics reacted strongly against certain trends prevalent in American criticism and society during the early twentieth century. Specifically, they disliked the evocative mode of Impres-sionist criticism, the moralism of Neo-Humanism, the antimodernist cul-tural criticism of Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks, and the sociologizing of Marxist criticism. In addition, they protested against academic criticism, specifically philology, textual bibliography, historical scholarship, and liter-ary history, which dominated university instruction, publication, and pro-motion.
eBook - ePub- Vincent B. Leitch(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
2 Though Brooks’ summary list of traits needs refinement and supplementation, it can serve as a rough charter of New Critical formalist ideas and methods. For some members of the School, this cluster of concepts constituted an organized critical system, while for others it amounted to a temporary set of attitudes about literature and criticism.To understand what New Critics stood for, it is useful to summon from the past what they stood against. In a retrospective assessment published in the late 1970s, Wellek recalled that New Critics reacted strongly against certain trends prevalent in American criticism and society during the early twentieth century. Specifically, they disliked the evocative mode of Impressionist criticism, the moralism of Neo-Humanism, the antimodernist cultural criticism of Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks, and the sociologizing of Marxist criticism. In addition, they protested against academic criticism, specifically philology, textual bibliography, historical scholarship, and literary history, which dominated university instruction, publication, and promotion. What they most uniformly deplored about academic criticism was its view of the literary canon: for example, no room was allotted for modern literature, and too little space was assigned to the metaphysical poets. Finally, most American New Critics detested science, particularly Ransom and Tate, for whom science, according to Wellek, “is the villain of history which had destroyed the community of man, broken up the old organic way of life, paved the way to industrialism, and made man the alienated, rootless, godless creature he has become in this century. Science encourages Utopian thinking, the false idea of the perfectibility of man, the whole illusion of endless progress.”3
eBook - PDF- Lajos Nyiro(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
It is difficult to draw a dividing line between the New Criticism and certain other critical schools of the twentieth century. For example, due to their performance as textual analysts, the myth critics who have a background of Freudianism, Jungianism and cultural history (Northrop Fry, Wilson Knight, Francis Fergusson, Philip Wheelwright, etc.) may also be regarded as New Critics. Another problem is posed by the broad interpretation of the New Criticism in the form it is presented in Robert Weimann's book. 5 Weimann uses the term New Criticism in the broad sense of movement is more notable for new emphases in criticism than for novelty of ideas. If there had existed in seventeenth-century England a critical school parallel to the metaphysical school of poetry, one might with some propriety name them 'The New Metaphysicals'. — J. P. Pritchard, Criti-cism in America (Norman, 1956), p. 231. 4 See Cleanth Brooks' foreword to Critiques and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York, 1949), p. XVI. 5 Robert Weimann, New Criticism und die Entwicklung bürgerlicher Literaturwissenschaft (Halle/Saale), 1962. THE New Criticism 117 the word, with reference to the convergent tendencies of Russian formalism, Polish and Czech structuralism, West-German and Swiss phenomenological poetics as well as to the Anglo-American New Criticism. That is, he applies a term which is as a rule used in a narrower sense to designate a broad philosophical trend of twentieth-century bourgeois literary scholarship, one that certainly deserves a more strictly qualifying descriptive term, for example structuralism or René Wellek's coinage, organistic and symbolistic formalism. 6 The American New Criticism doubtless bears much affinity to the afore-mentioned formalist and structural-ist schools.
eBook - PDFRussian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism
A Comparative Study
- Ewa M. Thompson(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
He observes that it has developed 'its own scholasticism' and 'its own technical jargon' which limit its appeal considerably. 52 Ransom himself (whose central position in New Criticism nobody questions), in The New Criticism grouped together such disparate people as T. S. Eliot and Ch. Morris. Walter Sutton sees as the distinguishing feature of the New Critics their practice of close textual analysis and the conser-vatism of their literary, social and political views. 58 In addition to that one frequently hears of the 'New Criticisms' in European countries. Le Sage's book The French New Criticism is an instance. 54 Among the generally recognized facts concerning New Criticism are the following: it arose to prominence in the United States in the 1930's and 40's, partly as a reaction to the literary criticism of the time, more interested in the causes of literature and in the place it occupies among other activities of man than in pointing out the architectonics of literary ambiguities. A reaction against a similar situation had earlier set in also in England, and the Americans owed a great deal to the examples of I. A. Richards, Τ. E. Hulme and the expatriate Eliot. Critics associated with J. C. Ransom and the Kenyon Review form the nucleus of New Criticism in the United States. They are all concerned with the close reading of the literary text. It appears to me that the descriptions of New Criticism tend to be performed from two basic viewpoints. From the first one sees New Criticism as an atmosphere rather than a movement, an atmosphere 81 The New Critics, Critiques and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York, 1949), pp. 488-508. 51 D. Daiches, The Present Age (London, 1958), p. 121 f. 55 W. Sutton, Modern American Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), pp. 98-151. 54 L. Le Sage, The French New Criticism (University Park, Penn., and London, 1967).
- Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, Edgar V. McKnight, Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, Edgar V. McKnight(Authors)
- 1994(Publication Date)
- Sheffield Academic Press(Publisher)
The exhaustion of New Testament historical criticism in general in the late 1960s and 1970s, however, brought New Testament scholars to examine literary Introduction 17 resources, including European structuralist models of study akin to American New Criticism. With the waning of Formalist-New Critical approaches in literary study, emphasis on the text in terms of language and discourse as the 'free play of signifiers' became an important factor in literary study in general and in New Testament literary study. Today changing patterns of reading in English and American literary studies are accompanied by changes in the organization of knowledge that defines the discipline of literary study. According to Steven Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, What confronts us at the present time...is not a unified field at all but diverse historical projects and critical idioms that are not organized around a single center but originate from a variety of sources, some of which lie outside the realm of literary study altogether and intersect one another often at strange angles (Greenblatt and Gunn 1992: 3). Although no one critical ideology has achieved the dominance of New Criticism, many of the major critical schools share a 'hermeneutics of suspicion' that seems entirely natural and inevitable today, as did the New Criticism in its day. Just as New Criticism did not establish com-plete hegemony, the critical orientations associated with poststructuralism or postmodernism have not placed all things in doubt. Greenblatt and Gunn applaud the dialectical relationship between the old and the new: Tor the goal in literary studies is not to seal off the frontier completely but to keep it conceptually alive; what is sought are not closed boundaries but regulated thresholds, controlled passageways' (1992: 8).
eBook - PDFFrom Outlaw to Classic
Canons in American Poetry
- Alan Golding(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- University of Wisconsin Press(Publisher)
Finally, I will address one particular means through which New Critical judg- ments and methods were spread through all levels of the academy and to a next generation of teachers and readers: the influential textbook Understanding Poetry. Evaluation and the Institutional Politics of New Criticism We actually have a good deal for which to thank the New Critics. For decades, it has been critically de rigueur to deprecate the narrowness of New Critical paradigms for reading poetry. But before the New Crit- icism, nobody in the academy had any paradigms to offer at all. These critics were "New" not so much in contrast to an earlier group of "Old" critics, but rather by virtue of simply being critics. In the institutional history of English departments, the New Critics are important not only for the nature of their definition of poetry, but also for the simple fact that they had a definition-one that provided a set of interpretive prin- ciples for a discipline that hitherto had lacked them, and that provided a basis for subsequent debate, disagreement, and divergence. In gain- ing acceptance for these principles, the New Critics changed the very 72 The New Criticism and American Poetry definition of English studies. They proposed both a critical method, to counter the profession's almost exclusively historical emphasis, and a canon, that of modernist poetry, which seemed to prove not merely the method's usefulness but its necessity to the profession's survival. An academic field of study defines itself and justifies its existence by foregrounding and laying special claim to a certain area of knowledge. Thus English, like all other academic departments, "emphasize[s] the unique identity of its subject, its special qualities and language, its special distinction as an activity of research and investigation" (Bled- stein 327).
eBook - PDF- Janine Marchessault(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
However, it is important to stress that the Cambridge New Critics were seeking to challenge certain orthodoxies in the study of English by counterposing aesthetics and dealing with the object itself. From I.A. Richards’s Principles and Practical Criticism , William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity , T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays , Leavis’s Reevaluation and C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love , the British New Critics brought criticism into the forefront. When these ideas crossed the ocean to the southern US they evolved into another form of criticism that was deeply conservative and a critical orthodoxy that was ahistorical. Yet as these ideas moved to Chicago and came to influence crit-ics like Maud Bodkin, Francis Ferguson and Northrop Frye (McLuhan’s long-time colleague at the University of Toronto); New Criticism 33 they also forged a rich assortment of approaches to textual analysis that, according to M.H. Abrams, has never been matched in English Studies since. Post-structuralist theory (via the decon-struction of Derrida) and critical theory (via feminist theory) challenged many of the universalist foundations of New Criticism’s aesthetic formalism, its separation of text from social and political context. Yet as Abrams points out, the influence of New Criticism on those more theoretical approaches to the analysis of texts (deconstruction, discourse analysis) is still evi-dent in the way the text becomes the location where hidden desires or motives are uncovered (1997: 120–21). Note 1 Williams argues that Leavis’s minoritarian view of education presents a fundamental contradiction for English Studies and its roots in the Adult Education Movement (1989: 153). 34 Marshall McLuhan
eBook - PDF- Malcolm Hebron(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
This excellence is also primarily a matter of technical dexterity rather than truth, beauty or moral excellence, concepts with which much modern criticism is uneasy. Having conceded such difficulties, we can nonetheless assert that Practical Criticism, Stylistics and rhetorical analysis are certainly invaluable foundational skills which can be integrated with other kinds of literary study. It might also be pointed out that Practical Criticism is at least honest enough to declare what it does not do, whereas contextual study is open-ended and sometimes wildly unrealistic in its vast multi-disciplinary aspirations. It is not the least virtue of close reading methods that they can be systematically taught and used from an early stage to do valuable work. But we should not believe that close reading provides a placid harbour, sheltered from the stormy waters of theoretical debate. For it does no such thing. And even if it did, why would one want to go there? See also Contexts : Humanism; Texts : Conceit, Decorum, Imitation, Metre, Mimesis, Prose Style, Rhetoric, Sonnet, Theory of Poetry; Criticism : Textualism Further Reading Geoffrey Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (Harlow: Longman, 1973). Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1970). Katie Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics (London: Longman, 1989). 244 C r i t i c i s m New Historicism Closely related to Cultural Materialism, New Historicism represented a turn in the 1980s against formalist approaches to literature, such as New Criticism and Structuralism. Where these involve the study of the literary text as an autonomous artefact, isolated from its surroundings, New Historicism seeks to historicise the text by locating it in its cultural, political, economic and social environment.
eBook - PDF- Paul H. Fry(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
This question does also have a sociopolitical dimension, however. There is another aspect of the thousand ways in which the New Criticism has been criticized for the last forty or fifty years that needs to be touched on now, though the others can wait. The notion of autonomy, the notion of the freedom of the poem from any kind of dependence in the world, is some-thing that is very easy to undermine critically. Think of Brooks’s analysis of Randall Jarrell’s “Eighth Air Force.” It concludes by saying that this is a poem about human nature under stress, and whether human nature is or is not good; arguments of this kind, Brooks says, set forth by the poem, “can make better citizens of us.” In other words, the experience of reading po-etry is not just an aesthetic experience. It’s not just a question of the private reconciliation of conflicting needs, whether in the text or in the mind. It’s a social experience, in this view, and the social experience of the New Critics is, unquestionably, a conservative one, though not reactionary. You can al-ready see the insistence on the need to balance opinions, to balance view-points, and to balance needs, precisely in a way that is, of course, a vote for social and political centrism on behalf of unity. How, then, can literature in this view be constructively progressive? For that matter, if one’s that way inclined, how can it be constructively reactionary? The New Criticism mi-cromanages in the interest of a unity that is implicitly social. That’s actually a mild version of what has been a frequent source of irritation with the New Criticism in its afterlife over the last forty or fi fty years. For various biographical reasons, the New Criticism has just as often been associated with reaction. The religious premise of this movement, too, has not been lost on its million critics.
eBook - PDF- Robert C. Evans, Eric J. Sterling, Robert C. Evans, Eric J. Sterling(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
Fourteen Ways of Looking at 8 Literature: A Survey of Current Approaches Robert C. Evans Chapter Overview Traditional Historical Criticism 148 Thematic Criticism 150 Formalist Criticism (Anglo-American ‘New Criticism’) 152 Psychoanalytic Criticism 153 Archetypal (or ‘Myth’) Criticism 155 Marxist Criticism 156 Structuralist Criticism 158 Feminist Criticism 159 Deconstructive Criticism 161 Reader-Response Criticism 162 Dialogical Criticism 163 New Historicist Criticism 165 Multicultural Criticism 166 Postmodernist Criticism 168 In the introduction to his classic study The Mirror and the Lamp , M.H. Abrams argued that any literary theory that tries to be complete must account for four basic aspects of literature: the author, the text, the audience, and the universe (or ‘reality’). Abrams’ list can be usefully supplemented by adding a fifth category: the role or function of the critic herself. Any reasonably well developed literary theory, in other words, will be a theory about all these factors and the relations among them. The assumptions a theorist makes 147 about the author, for example, will inevitably affect (and be affected by) the assumptions he makes about the text, the audience, ‘reality’, and the purposes of criticism. Indeed, Abrams argues that each theory will tend to emphasize one of these aspects as the crucial or most important factor – the one that colors and helps define all the others. 1 In the survey below, which is organized in rough chronological order (from older approaches to the most recent), the basic assumptions of each theory are sketched extremely briefly, and the crucial or defining emphasis of each theory is italicized. Each theory is then used to help explicate a single poem – Ben Jonson’s famous lyric ‘On My First Son’, which records the poet’s reaction to the sudden death of his seven-year-old namesake.
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